“That’s pleasantly wise of you.”
“I’m a pleasantly wise person.”
“That you are, kid.” Grady pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and pulled up Leda’s number. Then he spent half an hour composing a handful of words, hoping he wasn’t coming off like a jerk or a creep.
Thanks for meeting me today, and I’m sorry about whatever happened at the end. Please call or shoot me a text to let me know that you’re all right, and I swear I’ll leave you alone. If that’s what you want.
He pressed Send. Then he finished packing up his pilfered evidence and went online to do a little surreptitious info-hunting. He had questions about Rick Beckmeyer, and although some of those questions would have to be answered in person, more than a few answers might be found on the internet.
9.
Leda drove Jason the Accord like she’d stolen him, all the way back to the south side of town and her tiny, adorable bungalow she rented from a retired couple who were presently traveling the country in an RV. She flung herself inside, slammed the door, and immediately apologized to Brutus—even though he surely hadn’t heard the commotion. But she’d gotten into the habit of apologizing to him, and asking his permission, and telling him how handsome he was—even though Brutus was about the size of a stick of gum, and with the same allotment of brain cells.
Not all of Leda’s interactions with her piscine roommate made a great deal of sense, and she’d be the first one to admit it.
But Niki hadn’t answered her second frantic phone call, dialed on the interstate, against Seattle local laws (and risking a hefty ticket, like that was going to stop her this time). Niki also hadn’t responded to the subsequent frantic voice mail, but in Niki’s defense, it’d been only about twenty-five minutes since Leda had abandoned a cold crime scene and the perfectly nice cop who’d persuaded her to meet him there.
She’d never made such good time crossing town before, but she was entirely too rattled to be excited about it. Instead, she paced and fretted, shaking her phone as if doing so would persuade Niki to magically dial in and hear all about it.
Leda was almost desperate enough to call her mom in Spokane when Niki somehow heard the psychic Bat-Signal (or else she’d finally listened to the voice mail) and reached out to learn what the big emergency was.
Before Niki could even say hello, Leda was in full “marbles mode”—a state they’d coined together that one time when they were on the run from a security guard in a golf cart while fleeing the allegedly haunted yacht club boathouse of high school infamy.
People can scatter like marbles. Sometimes their thoughts do, too.
“The cop Grady Merritt had something to do with Tod’s death,” she blurted. “I don’t know what and I don’t know how, but when I shook his hand I got a flash—a crazy flash, like, the strongest flash I’ve ever had—and I saw a moment of… of…” She was hyperventilating now. “Of Tod’s body in the car. I saw Tod, shot and drowned in the back seat; that’s what I saw when I shook Grady’s hand!”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Niki replied. “Hang on, now. He’s not the cop who investigated the case; I know he’s not. It was an old dude and his partner, a younger woman. She died a year or two ago in a shoot-out at a liquor store, right?”
“Whiteside, yeah, that was the old guy’s name. It was practically his last case before he retired, and he half-assed it. He never took me seriously, and he avoided me, and he didn’t want to answer my questions, and he was a big fat jerk, and—”
Niki interrupted. “He was a perfectly nice old man who didn’t have any answers. It’s not his fault that Tod got murdered.”
“Tod got murdered,” she echoed back, phlegm in her throat and tears in her eyes. “Tod got murdered, and I didn’t see it coming. It’s the only thing I actually know how to do, Nik. I can see things coming, and then one time, I didn’t. Not when it counted.”
“It’s not your fault.” Niki kept her voice level and calm.
With despair and a snot bubble, Leda cried, “It’s somebody’s fault!”
“That’s a fact, babe. But it’s not your fault; it’s not this cop’s fault. It’s not the old cop’s fault, either, and it probably wasn’t even Tod’s fault. Maybe, though… maybe your woo-woo vibes are trying to tell you to work with this new guy. What if they’re trying to point you in the right direction and chase you toward some actual answers?”
Leda slumped into an overstuffed recliner that looked like it belonged in the office of an elderly rich man who smoked cigars and sipped brandy in his downtime. She tucked her knees against her chest and clutched her phone tight to her ear. She brought her voice down a few decibels and at least one octave when she said, “Maybe it’s Tod’s ghost.”
“You don’t believe in ghosts.”
“I’ve never seen one or talked to one, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. I’ve never talked to a billionaire, either. Or… or a treasure hunter. Or a lion tamer. For that matter, I don’t know what ghosts sound like when they try to communicate. What if they sound like flashes of light and terrible visions? What if they sound like migraines? Anything could be a clue, Nik. Anything.”
“You had vibes and visions for years before Tod died. His ghost is not the source, and now you’re grasping at straws.”
“Then what is the source?” Leda asked the universe at large.
“Sweetheart, if we knew that…” Niki didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t need to.
“If we knew that,” Leda grimly agreed. It wasn’t even a question anymore, because the answer probably didn’t matter.
“Listen, I’m on my way home from the grocery store. It’s hard to hold this phone and”—she shifted something around—“three bags of heavy crap while I’m working with a boot cast and a limp, but I’ll be done in another ten minutes. We only just got back from Snoqualmie. You want me to head over?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. Give me half an hour.”
“Twenty minutes,” Leda bargained.
“I’ve got ice cream here. Other things I need to put away, too. But I’ll be there as soon as I can, I promise.”
They hung up, and Leda clung to her best friend’s vow. She had to survive on her own, with no one but Brutus to cry to, for only half an hour. Likely a little longer than that, knowing Niki. Niki always ran fifteen to twenty minutes late, unless Leda was flogging her with the Guilt Whip of Punctuality.
Forty-five minutes, then. She could hang on that long.
She bounced out of the chair and went to the tiny dining nook beside the kitchen, where Brutus’s tank was sitting on a vintage buffet near the window. She was careful to keep him from getting too much direct sunlight, and careful to keep him from getting too cold, and careful to keep him from eating too much. And while Leda could survive on Rice Krispies treats and beef jerky, left to her own devices, her single small pet ate the most expensive fish food she could find, on the grounds that it was surely the highest quality.
She’d tasted it once—putting one tiny pellet on her tongue—and then wished she hadn’t for the next six hours. It’d been like a wee breath mint in “concentrated tide pool” flavor, and the aftertaste had lingered.